Sparkling Cyanide (1945)

PLOT: Who poisoned Rosemary's birthday champagne last year?


This book contains the worst sentence I've come across by Agatha Christie:

"Anthony took a gingerly sip of coffee."

Something about its sheer wrongness captivates me. "Anthony gingerly took a sip of coffee" would be fine. "Anthony took a nervous sip of coffee" would also win. Instead we have this weird monstrosity - I have to admit, it fascinates me.

Why? This isn't me jumping on the "Agatha Christie can't write" bandwagon. Graeme Greene apparently sneered she employed the English of a schoolgirl - which misses the point. Agatha Christie is a brilliant writer. There are many, many other writers from the Golden Age of Crime who are now forgotten; barely readable then, utterly unreadable now.

If Agatha Christie merely constructed amazing plots thinly plastered over with simple words, then she wouldn't still enjoy her amazing success. A good writer has great characters and it is her characters that people still talk about - everyone knows Poirot and Marple.

Agatha Christie has a style - you've only got to look at the marvellous wrongness of The Big Four when one of her relatives rolled up his sleeves and pitched in, keen to prove that anyone can have a crack at writin' one of these crime thingies, to realise that only Agatha Christie can write Agatha Christie. The Big Four is all plot and no style (and what a plot - sinister Chinees, death rays and dastardly doubles. Blimey).

At the other extreme is Postern of Fate which is all style and no plot. But it's remarkably entertaining and a great read purely because of the style. People do read Agatha Christie because of the writing.

So why am I picking on this one sentence? Because it allows me to arbitrarily point, midway through her career and say "she's become uneditable". Just as people highlight the moment when Harry Potter went from books to tomes, this is the moment at which Agatha Christie editors started waving her works through regardless. Or perhaps it was because there was a war on.

There certainly isn't a war on in Sparkling Cyanide. It's a curiously timeless, vaguely pre-War book in which the coffee is bad, but an heiress's only trouble is what to do with her money. There's perhaps a hint that the meagreness of rationing preyed on the author's mind - we get an unusually loving recitation of the fatal menu at the Luxembourg, conjured up with all the lavish attention employed for one of Lord Snooty's feasts.

The novelty in the book is that the central crime has already happened before page one. I read on, confidently expecting a flashback, but it never came. The crime is instead relived in moments, and then recreated with a fatal twist that takes you by surprise.

The victim - Rosemary - hovers over the book like a ghost, and we get a picture of her from the point of view of the suspects, several obsessed by her, but only one of them liking her. She deliberately never really appears - she is Christie's Rebecca.

The book is a character study - in some ways the actual crimes and investigation are an anticlimax to the people. For instance, the devious politician and his docile wife who, it transpires, is a much more complicated personality than anyone else even guesses at - Christie's masterstroke with poor Lady Alexander is that she reveals her brilliance to the reader, and then draws the curtain again, so we must read the second half of the book with everyone from her parents to casual acquaintances dismissing her as "mad" and "gothic". This leads to a remarkable scene where her parents, convinced of her guilt, confront each other:

"They looked at each other - so far divided that neither could see the other's point of view. So might Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have stared at each other with the word Iphigenia on their lips."

See? Marvellous stuff. The book is full of lovely bits of style, and Christie indulges herself shamelessly with a nutty spinster ("Twitterers can tell one a lot if one just lets them - twitter") as well as some spot-on observation:

"Iris's face adopted that same look of blank enquiry that her great-grandmother might have worn prior to saying a few minutes later "Oh Mr X, this is so sudden!"

Underneath all this razor sharp invention is a plot that almost... almost cheats. Christie takes you into the confidence of all of the suspects, while at the same time dragging a huge red herring across the trail. The reveal (when it comes) works, and works cleverly, but the reader is allowed the same kind of groan as when on the receiving end of a truly terrible pun.

Looking back you realise that all of the hints have been there, and everyone who should have been interviewed was, and all lines of enquiry were pursued... but... but... still. You've been well and truly had.

Her ingenious conclusion does even excuse the one wopping bit of racism in the book (we'll sadly wave through the other jarring references to Negro bands).

We meet again Colonel Race (who permeates Christie without ever really being more than a cameo), there is mention of Sergeant Battle, and there is even, quite surprisingly, a maid called Evans.

The Moving Finger (1943)

Plot: Poison-pen letters lead to tragedy in a small village.

The Poison-pen letter is a preoccupation of classic crime. Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night dances high above the canon as an example of frustrated Women Who Hate (it being a staple of these stories that such letters are only written by women).

When Agatha Christie tackles poison pen letters, of course she wheels out a spinster to catch a spinster – but this is very much a novel in which Miss Marple cameos at best. Just as Cat Among The Pigeons is a delightful feast with Poirot as a digestif, Miss Marple totters along at the very end of this book to offer a neat solution.

In the meantime we're on familiar ground of gossip and suspicion and wise counsel in a small community. As usual, the servants are a problem – there's a death which may be suicide until a maid is found brutally slain because she knew too much but didn't speak out in time, the silly moo. From there on in it rattles along nicely until we realise that we've been looking in the wrong direction entirely and that this isn't a tale of a rotten community but a more domestic horror. With added Marple.

What makes this as a book is that it's really a love story – it's about the narrator falling in love with a girl who is variously described as ugly, simple, plain, backward and ill-dressed. However, almost without realising it, the narrator gives her a proper makeover and falls dazzlingly in love with her. This is the real heart of the book – that in an atmosphere of suspicion this unusual relationship doesn't come under attack is one of the biggest clues as to what is really going on. Of course, this doesn't escape Miss Marple's notice. Nor does she miss the shopping montage.

Curiously, Christie claims this as one of her favourites. Which is odd – it's certainly one of her more believable and moving love stories, but as a Miss Marple book it's a strange beast.

The Body in the Library (1942)

Plot: "Ma'am, there's a body in the library!"

Familiarity can breed contempt. Or a mild boredom. I've put off reading The Body In The Library for just that reason - after all, if you've seen the brilliant BBC version several times, and sat squirming in horrified delight through the ITV travesty... well, why need you bother reading the wretched book? It can't better the opening of the BBC wonder - "There's a body in the library!" can it?

Oh yes it bloody can. The sheer delight of The Body In The Library is that it contains everything that The Murder On The Links was missing. The latter was a beautifully crafted machine of a plot - but The Body In The Library is just as wonderful a bit of engineering, only wrapped in a knitted fluffy pink cover.

The sublime opening line is "Mrs Bantry was dreaming. Her sweet peas had just taken a First at the flower show." We are straight back in St Mary Mead with all its domestic horrors and spinsters sniping across the privet. There are glorious cameos from The Murder At The Vicarage. Gossiping Miss Hartnell is back:

"'His poor wife,' Miss Hartnell tried to disguise her deep and ardent pleasure."

Also returning is Griselda the vicar's wife in a charming cameo rolling around on a rug with her toddler.

We also get returns from the cast of The Thirteen Problems - the Bantrys and Sir Henry Clithering.  Dolly Bantry rocks, as ever, summing up her reaction to her husband flirting with "pretty girls who come to tennis":

"There's no harm in it. And why shouldn't he? After all... I've got the garden."

But it is Miss Marple who dominates this book, and does so brilliantly, stealing scenes she's not even in. Every moment is perfectly, wonderfully described, such as when the telephone rings too early in the morning:

"So well ordered was her prim spinster's life that unforseen telephone calls were a source of vivid conjecture."

Which leads us to Dolly's breathlessly immortal:

"We've just found a body in the library."

It's tempting to just type out whole chunks of the book. It's as delightful as a menacing trifle. It'd be nice to say "Only Agatha Christie and Jane Austen really understood the true nature of the English Village" but... oh, sod it, let's.

There are so many glorious, incidental details. For instance Basil Blake's country cottage:

"A hideous shell of sham Tudor, was known to the postal authorities, and to William Booker, builder, as 'Chatsworth'; to Basil and his friends as 'The Period Place', and to the village of St Mary Mead at large as 'Mr Booker's new house'."

What's so lovely about this sentence is how much is tells us about the dry practicality of St Mary Mead, the modern wit of Basil Blake's set, and even the pretensions of poor William Booker, builder - a character who is not even in the book. But this is Christie at her absolute best, both as a plotter and a stylist. The sheer wonder of Miss Hartnell's envious protest at Miss Marple having gone up to view the body before breakfast - "Well, I mean, I think that is carrying things too far."

That's not to say the book is an out-and-out comedy - far from it. The humour is always shrewd and there are moments of genuine awkwardness, such as when the crippled millionaire Jefferson wakes up, both literally and from his infatuation with Ruby Keene - "'Margaret...' It was the name of his dead wife..."

There's a similarly delicate hand at work in the handling of the murder of the girl guide Pamela Reeves. Child murders are quite rare in Christie, and this compares interestingly with the comparatively callous description of the dispatch of the victim in Dead Man's Folly.

The humane shrewdness continues in Sir Henry's perfect introduction of Miss Marple:

"Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face, and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day's work. Her name's Miss Marple."

Miss Marple is at her shrewdest in this book, dropping apposite stories about boys hiding frogs in clocks, and making wonderful comparisons to various maids, as when she reveals that her "little maid Janet" always relaxed too soon after telling a lie: "She'd explain quite convincingly that the mice had eaten the end of a cake and give herself away by smirking as she left the room."

This comes at the end of the scene where Miss Marple has interviewed girl guides and has decided which one has more to say. Wonderfully:


"Miss Marple spoke crisply.
'I'd like to speak to Florence Small.'"

Oh lawks, I have typed out most of this book, but it is a glorious thing. Miss Marple reduces everyone in the book to the "General Common Denominator", describing Jefferson's infatuation with Ruby Keene through village life, explaining how when Mr Harbottle's sister left him for to nurse a relative, she returned to find him infatuated with the maid and herself banished to "live most uncomfortably in rooms in Eastbourne" because "the old man found it much pleasanter to have a young, cheerful girl telling him how clever and amusing he was than to have his sister continually pointing out his faults to him". Isn't that just brilliant? In about three paragraphs we get a rattling good parable that also tells the whole story of three people utterly incidental to the story.

Miss Marple is at her absolute sharpest. There's the wonderful showdown with Basil Blake and his lover Miss Dinah Hill where they're both absolutely vile to her and she simply sits there and strips away their wicked veneer to reveal how deeply lovingly conventional they are, winning them both over in a couple of lines. It's an amazing scene, and gets followed by Miss Marple's remarkable revelation of the real Basil when she says how he rescued four people and a dog from a burning building in an act of stunning heroism.

A lot of this is sheer, glorious window dressing. A delight in knowing the plot from the television is realising that Miss Marple has solved it very early on. By halfway through she has announced "There was a very careful plan made. What happened was that the plan went wrong". A few pages later she announces of a vital clue "It had been worrying me, you know - how to account for her nails." There's still nearly a hundred pages to go, but this isn't annoying. Miss Marple isn't smug - we're enjoying the journey and we know she'll tell us in her own time. She even later informs Dolly that she knows everything but won't tell Dolly because she knows her too well. "It's no good, dear."

Although Miss Marple dominates the book, other characters sing. Colonel Bantry's social exclusion is marvellously described:


"Did you go to dinner with the Duffs on Thursday?"
"Oh, that! It was put off. Their cook was ill."
"Stupid people," said Mrs Bantry... She sat down by the desk and absent-mindedly picked up a pair of gardening scissors. With them she cut off the fingers, one by one, of her second glove.
"What are you doing, Dolly?"
"Feeling destructive,"

There's also the exceedingly painful description of Jefferson finding a picture of a young man in Ruby Keene's handbag, which is Agatha Christie's equivalent of Desdemona's handkerchief: "Now then Kitten, now then. You know who it is right enough."

Even a cameo such as the dancer Raymond Starr ("one of the Devonshire Starrs" it is claimed) gets the following remarkable speech about why he left work at a hotel in the Riviera, after overhearing an old Colonel saying:

"Where's the gigolo? I want to get hold of the gigolo. My wife and daughter want to dance, yer know. Where is the feller? What does he sting yer for? It's the gigolo I want."

Raymond even gets the last line of the book to himself when, dreams crushed he must carry on:


"Oh well, my luck's out. Dance, dance, little gentleman!"

There's also the peculiarly lovely touch of the nine year-old detective who announces proudly "I've got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie" - make of that what you will. This is an author who is on top of her game and knows it - but is also accidentally setting up the cute self-awareness of the Margaret Rutherford films. Let's just for a second imagine the glory of Margaret Rutherford and Mr Stringer solving the case of The Body In The Library. Oh go on - ballroom dancing, tennis, girl guides and film stars and even more ballroom dancing. The frocks alone would make you faint.

Seriously, this is utterly, utterly brilliant.

Towards Zero (1944)

Plot: "When murder is the end and not the beginning"

Towards Zero keeps reminding you that it is an experimental book, but it's easy to forget that it is. It says at the start that the murder will happen at the end. Despite this, two murders happen roughly where you'd expect them to in a Christie book - one early on, and then a major one at about the halfway point. Duly, you at this point forget that this is all a sideshow and decide "ah, look at that, there's a definite murder". This is a mistake - when Christie tells you you should be thinking about a major murder to come and you don't, you're asking for trouble.

This is a book about predestination, about people being moved into place - some of them by a mad manipulator, and some of them by fate. It's about celestial clockwork being set in motion - although, that said, there are some odd things about this book:

1) Too many characters
Seriously, if you can remember who everyone is throughout, you're doing well. I've picked this book up to make notes on and am thinking "no, now hang on, is he the colonial adventurer or the noble suicide?". There's an equally baffling splay of girls and boys and it all gets quite confusing - not in the sense of "Who can the murderer be?" so much as "Who are all of you?".

2) Clever stuff
Inspector Battle is back, and is introduced in a brilliant mini-adventure about solving theft at his daughter's school which shows him off as the master of subtle social observation. It seems like a throw-away incident, but Christie reminds you at the end, it is not - it is vitally important to how Battle later works out who has done what.

3) Good lies
The resolution of the mystery relies on a good and clever character (who only now enters the story) guessing the remarkable way in which the murder was committed... and lying about it. This is interesting - especially as Battle knows and approves of the lie.

4) Things to be wary of
The story hinges on a dashing man trying to win back his first wife. Now, given what you know of how Christie looks at dashing ex-husbands, wounded first wives and troublesome second wives, see if you can guess who might be at the heart of the murder mystery?

5) Naming
Yes, it's very funny that a character is called Mr Royde. But there's also someone called Neville Strange. Which, when you get to the end of the book, appears all too clearly peculiar.

6) Something fishy
This book features an actual red herring in the form of a fishy smell which is... a fishy smell. I'm racking my head for a similar scent-related clue occuring in Christie, and I can't think of one, beyond the occasional mention of a whiff of bitter almonds.

7) The dancing boy
The book features Ted Latimer - the second Mrs Strange's best friend. He's curiously written - referred to as "a gigolo" or as something bright and loud and entertaining. But he's not actually gay - his flamboyance merely hides a broken heart. Curiously, it is his bitter observance of the characters of the book as "animals... happy and superior in your roped-off enclosure" that gets to the real nature of the people in the book (and the deceit they're wrapped up in).

8) Fate and clockwork
Interestingly, at the end of the book it's like a purging of a plague - not only is everyone now in the right place to marry the right people, but a curse has been lifted, and for the first time, if you think about it, you can perceive why everyone is in the position that they've been put in. It's quite a subtle trick that goes on - sometimes re-reading of various passages shows you that the reasons for something happening have been quite different to how the people involved have thought them.

Death Comes as the End (1945)

Plot: A serial killer in Ancient Egypt.

I owe this book an apology. It's taken me six months to read it and several false starts. It even failed the "curl up in bed with a stiff drink" approach. Finally I succumbed on a lazy Sunday afternoon and, if you can get past the first fifty pages, it's corking.

The problem with Death Comes As The End is the beginning. It's telling that this is one of the easiest Christie books to find second hand, frequently with a pristine spine and a smell of defeat. I wonder how many holidays have had a morning on a sun-lounger slightly ruined by the first few chapters before it gets swapped for something easier.

To be critical and snobbish, Christie is normally devlishly easy reading. This book isn't. Here's a sample few early sentences:
"The total then is two hundred and thirty of spelt and one hundred and twenty of barley."
"Yes, but there is the price of the timber and the crop was paid in oil at Perhaa."

or
"Guard the produce of my grain, guard everything of mine, for I shall hold you responsible."

As viewers of The Phantom Menace known, trade and taxes are a great way to start, plus we continually hear of young Renisenb who lies around drowsily. When the heroine is more bored than the reader, you're in trouble.

I'm going to argue that Christie is showing off her research and her sourcea. She claims to have based the book on some letters, and seems to reproduce them throughout the book. Which is all very well, but initially really doesn't help. It's all wheat and exhortation.

Get fifty pages in though, and the cast start dropping like flies. Even better, they're all brilliant - there's the vile gossip Henet, the proto Marple Esa, the pompous dad Imhotep, his awful sons, their sour wives, his noble daughter and her fun suitors. From thereon in the book tears along with an incredibly high corpse-per-page count, as though Christie is making up for the false start. "Sorry it's a bit tricky, but look, there goes another one."

You even find yourself flicking back to the start and re-reading it for extra clues. Or to try and remember who these people are and how they were introduced. Occasionally, the narrative swings back to the opening style and we get drowsy mention of afternoon cruises in pleasure boats and so on. But it's far more bearable as, with a turn of the page, there'll be another corpse.

The book's other distraction is the chapter titles which are in a complicated dating system based on tides. Initially I spent much time puzzling over these, but then ignored them and was much happier.

I'm sure there are readers out there who've just dived into the book and loved it, but I don't think I'm the only one who struggled until Christie's natural style asserts itself.

But what of the plot itself? Well, once it gets going, you're in for something a bit like Taken At The Flood, where a new wife throws a family into deadly disarray. These are very Christie people - with concealed passions, submerged pasts, and tortured inner lives. The parallels with Taken At The Flood are several, including the discovery of a raving madman hiding behind a humble farmer's personality. The references to domestic abuse also abound, with one wife being "the kind of woman who would enjoy it".

Where Taken At The Flood offers us the dazed new wife and her vindictive brother/lover, this book gives us the scheming new wife and her dazed former lover, who spends most of his time composing bloody awful songs and talking about sailing on his pleasure boat. This turns out not to be a euphemism.

Both books are fundamentally about how a family engages with a new wife, and her response to the various methods of bribery and bullying. Of course, Nofret is more active. In Taken At The Flood it's the brother who does all the threatening and undermining while the wife flops around as drowsy as Renisenb.

Renisenb is kind of the heroine, but she's as light as a feather. The book's detective-types are old Mrs Esa and the foreman Hori, but they're not necessarily to be trusted. Renisenb floats between the two of them, or sits drowsily around wondering why everyone's in love with her. It's a good question, frankly. Partly it increases the number of suspects, partly there seems to be a tradition for a Christie gal to have two fellas after her, one poetic, one solid.

The book's best character is nasty Henet the whining confidant. We've met her before in Christie, but she's here at her sharpest and nastiest. She's the real villain of the piece, having schemed for decades to bring down a family she doesn't even belong to through devoted service. She lights up every page that she's on.

A similar triumph comes in a remarkable passage where we have a murder from the point of view of a victim, waking up and realising that they've been poisoned. It's a lovely bit of writing from Christie. I'm scratching my head trying to remember a similar passage somewhere else - I think there is one, but this is a brilliant scene as we catch the flickering brilliance of a dying consciousness working out what's happened and why. This isn't a soul that dies screaming but one that uses its last few precious seconds to solve a puzzle and so pass on content.

Overall, if you can sweep aside the opening, the character names and the occasional purple passage, this is a brilliant book - satisfyingly gory, full of great events and cunning misdirection, and with some bang-up characters evoking a distant era with remarkable clarity. By the end, I felt thoroughly ashamed that I'd made such hard work of the beginning.

Five Little Pigs (1942)

PLOT: Poirot is asked to solve a murder that took place 16 years ago, and does so by talking to the five witnesses. A lot.



There's a despicable kind of person who apparently can't resist flicking to the end of a detective novel just to know who did it. Five Little Pigs is that remarkable thing, a book which feel like you needn't to bother.

I'm not claiming any amazing deductive powers here. This is a book that, from a handful of pages in, pretty much screams the name of the villain. The clues are dropped in so obviously they may as well be printed in bold italic with a bit of underlining. But are things really that simple? Even if they're just red herrings, should they be painted such a bright shade of scarlet?

It's a peculiar book all in. Perhaps I'm just saying that because knowing who did it in this case knocks so much of the stuffing out of it. You can, you should, re-read Murder of Roger Ackroyd knowing who did it. But this is one where, from the very first, you don't even detect cunning misdirection, so much as a giant arrow hanging over the perpetrator whenever their name is mentioned. And if it doesn't turn out to be them, then it's an absolutely massive cheat.

In terms of approach it is similar to Josephine Tey's Daughter Of Time, in that it unleashes a detective on a long-ago crime. Poirot must pick his way through recollection and written statements, overturning accepted fact and revealing a deeper psychological truth. Or, if you prefer, Poirot must kick his heels for a couple of hundred pages before revealing the bleeding obvious.

Without the narrative veneer of Hastings, we do get a remarkable insight into the detective's methods. We see him deciding when to "play the foreigner", by turns flattering, deceiving, or applying rigorous candour. We see him carefully, ingeniously cultivating the trust of suspects, of relaying half of a truth in the hopes of securing revelation.

We also see more of Poirot's mind. The book is mostly about the careful interrogation of five suspects - and we see how, powerfully, Poirot doesn't care for any of them very much. Whereas Miss Marple loves people for all their weaknesses, Poirot sees each suspect merely as a type and works on them accordingly.

In many books the human centre is Hastings. In this book it is the cameo of the victims' daughter, all grown up. Everyone else is merely fodder for Poirot's mental machinery. Poor Clara Lemarchant - a wild artist for a father and an equally precarious mother, damned by everyone. Even Clara, determined to vindicate her, says "I wasn't, I don't think, especially fond of her".

The art of the book lies in delicately layering and relayering Clara's idea of her parents. Sometimes we see them as vile grotesques, at others as deeply human and interesting for all of their flaws. Sometimes we side with the mother, sometimes with the father, frequently with their friends, and even occasionally with the wily girl intent on destroying their marriage.

The problem is that, just as Poirot doesn't like any of them very much, neither do we. There's some remarkable psychology at work, but also a sneaking suspicion that Agatha Christie herself doesn't care for any of them either.

It is a cold book. There's little of Christie's trademark humour and warmth. Sometimes, reading these books, you think what fun it would be to meet these people. But not this one - you get an impression of awkward meals, gin and door-slamming.

It is at its most remarkable when it offers portraits of the survivors - such as Lord and Lady Dittisham in their cold, luxurious palace. If Lord Dittisham is a poet without human sympathy, his wife is a statue robbed of a soul.

While I've said the structure is remarkable, it's actually a twist on the route often taken by Ngaio Marsh, where the crime takes place and then is narrated from several points of view by witnesses before the detective sees the way through the woods. And, oddly, just as the heart sinks slightly when you realise you're reading one of the duller Ngaio Marsh novels, there's a similar feeling that hangs over Five Little Pigs - it is a book held prisoner in its structure. It's especially dispiriting when, Poirot having interviewed all five suspects, he then reviews their five written accounts. "Oh no, not again," you groan - even though it's a great exercise in different narrative voices, and is also stripping the detective novel down to its bare essentials - five subtly conflicting narratives. Five little pigs. One porkie pie.

Curiously, Christie will return to the "nostalgia murder" approach a couple of times - including in the late, problematic Poirot adventure, Elephants Can Remember. It's as though she's trying to solve not a murder, but a structure. Somewhere in this, she is thinking, is the key to a brilliant mystery novel. Maybe I've not quite got it yet, but I'll have another go...

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940)

PLOT: Someone really doesn't like dentists.


This book is about remarkable coincidence. You can buy that a murder happens whenever Poirot goes on holiday, just as Jessica Fletcher's friends probably check in with their solicitors every time she announces she's dropping round.

By now, of course, you'd assume that if you were planning a murder and you realise that Poirot is on holiday with you, you'd have second thoughts. Similarly, if you're a rich heiress with a persecution complex and Poirot turns up, you'd either jump off the train or summon a priest.

At first glance, this book takes that on the chin. Poirot isn't on safari but mundanely at the dentist. This is an everyday creepy setting and a great place for a murder... but...

The chain of coincidence that this book then requires is remarkable.

• Poirot has a dentist. Fine.
  
• He shares this dentist with the most powerful financial brain in Britain. Also fine - after all, why not specialise in clever teeth?
  
• Although one of your clients is Miss Sainsbury Seale, who is very dim.
  
• And she just happens to know a powerful secret.
  
• She also just happens to have met a powerful blackmailer who just happens to have toothache.

So, just a few pages in, remarkable machinery has been set in motion and the murderer is presented with a most remarkable opportunity that will change the country's future. It's too good to miss. But, and you should remember this... this is also Poirot's dentist!

For the book to succeed, and it does succeed, Christie lays on top of this coincidence a remarkable number of layers of complexity.

So, as well as the dentist at the centre of the universe we have impostors, super secret spies, mysterious organisations, false telegrams and suspicious fiancees as well as at least one death which is almost motiveless.

This is a book stuffed full of herrings, some of them painted a magnificent red which is patiently washed off by Poirot, leaving you, by the end, aware that the book is about something you really didn't think it could be about.

The framing device of the nursery rhyme adds to the splendid conclusion - it has almost nothing to do with the story, and yet, by the end, you realise it has everything to do with the solution.

The book also re-poses the question of necessary murder to Poirot. Is there such a thing as a crime that is so important that justice cannot be brought? Not in Poirot's eyes. Curiously, the ITV adaptation implies that, by making this choice, Poirot causes the second world war. Which seems a little unfair.

Taken At The Flood (1948)

PLOT: Can Poirot save rich widow Rosaleen Underhay?



Poirot's made it through the Second World War. When we first met him he was a refugee during the First World War and possibly retired. So how old is he now? It's best not to ask.

Taken At The Flood is interesting from the point of "Does Christie change with the times, or does she simply redress her mannequins in fashionable outfits?". This is a grim novel of a damaged, glum Britain, with air raids, blitzed London and villages plunged into miserable poverty. It's very contemporary and appropriate - there's no sense of conspicuous affluence or that the cast haven't been changed by the global upheaval.

And yet... peel off the new wrappings, and we've the classic village full of suspicion, a rich young heiress, a black sheep, a tiny bit of occult and a lot of vocal and chemical poison. The sense is that, despite everything, England carries on - the world of quiet malice behind the flower arranging.

Poirot is dragged in by the poisonously new age Mrs Lionel Cloade ("M. Poirot, I have come to you under spirit guidance"). It's a story of an Old Family who are trying to adjust to New Money - to their rich brother's nervous widow, Rosaleen, and her domineering brother, David.

It's world of subtle nastiness and complicated resentments. The Cloades despise Rosaleen, but depend on her for money, at the same time as questioning just how she came into her inheritance. The story all comes down to what noble Lynn Cloade realises - "We'd do anything, anything for money."

The story splits two ways - both an investigation of mystery of the past and a mysterious stranger from the present, and Poirot hovers over both, quietly, regretfully investigating. And everywhere he turns is the same motive - "We'd do anything for money". So it is that we meet characters like the shabby genteel Major, who still goes to his club but lives in threadbare poverty, broken by taxation. Every single person in the book is driven by greed - this is the world of classic Christie but come upon hard times.

So it is that we find Poriot at a miserable hotel ("Here there was a good fire, but in a large arm-chair, toasting her toes comfortably, was a monumental old lady who glared at Poirot" and the Coffee Room, "the only time coffee was served there was somewhat grudgingly for breakfast and that even then a good deal of watery hot was its principal component"), carrying out his investigation into the lives of people who are literally mean-spirited. In many ways it's business as usual - complicated lies and alibis, but hanging over it is a sense of tiredness and despair. The war is over but there's no real sense of victory, and everyone's morals are slightly off balance.

It's a melancholy, dismal book, and affecting in its sense of tragedy. The noblest character is Lynn, returning from war to find herself repelled by her lovelorn cousin Rowley and instead besotted with rakish David. But who will she end up with? Well, actually, that's one of the most interesting, and troubling scenes...

SPOILERS:

Lynn goes to see Rowley to break the news that she's leaving him for exciting, risky David. Rowley is anguished - she's been away to war, he's been stuck behind, having to keep the farm going. He feels left out of life and now abandoned by her. For her part she's refusing to give up her independence, her love of excitement.

And then Rowley cracks, and strangles Lynn, and we realise that Rowley's broken the law to keep order.

Only... Poirot turns up at the last minute, suggests a pot of tea, and explains what's really happened. It's quite startling - oddly like the kitchen murder from Torn Curtain in its savagery and civility, but also has a really, really odd conclusion.

Lynn realises that, after all, it is Rowley she loves. Or, as she puts it, "When you caught hold of me by the throat... I knew then that I was your woman." Umm. I think the point is that she's realised that Rowley isn't as meek as she thought he was, but the message that's coming over is that a bit of domestic violence can bring necessary spice to a relationship. Ah well, different times.

The ending is ultimately and appropriately bleak and morally curious. Poirot, the avenging angel, allows death to be misattributed and for a killer to find happiness with someone they attempted to murder.